Facebook is counting the losses from Monday’s outage which has been described as its worst ever. This happened after its group of platforms all went down for about 6 hours – Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp were all unusable across devices and ISPs around the world, leaving billions of users without access to important communications channels.
Aside from that, the outage was said to have shut even Facebook staff out of the company’s internal network as they were unable to gain access during the outage. The company has since said that the massive outage was due to a “faulty configuration change.”
While apologizing to the over 3.5 billion people who use Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram, company CEO and founder, Mark Zuckerberg said that “Sorry for the disruption today – I know how much you rely on our services to stay connected with the people you care about.”
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Zuckerberg’s problems were just beginning. The founder of the social network lost $7-billion of his net worth due to Facebook’s stocks taking a dive after the outage and new reports from a Facebook insider that blew the lid off the company’s harmful user policies.
In a day, the social media world saw a shift. Millions flocked to Facebook’s rival apps as they searched for means of communication. On Twitter, people surged to tweet their thoughts on the matter. Twitter was touted as Facebook’s chief rival in the social space since its launch in 2006, and as the Facebook family of apps were offline, users flocked to the next largest forum to mock Zuckerberg and his woes.
WhatsApp has over 2-billion people in its user base with the outage, most people rushed to rival platforms with Telegrams gaining most users of over 70 million.
“The daily growth rate of Telegram exceeded the norm by an order of magnitude, and we welcomed over 70 million refugees from other platforms in one day,” founder Pavel Durov wrote on his Telegram channel.
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The influx was so sudden and so large that Pavel said some users in the Americas may have experienced slower speeds as millions rushed to communicate with others.
Another WhatsApp competitor, Signal, saw an influx in users after Facebook’s chatting staple went down. According to its official Twitter account, Signal saw “millions” of new users join its service during the outage.
Millions Of New People Have Joined Signal Today And Our Messaging And Calling Have Been Up And Running But Some People Aren’t Seeing All Of Their Contacts Appear On Signal. We’re Working Hard To Fix This Up.
The chat app was also directly endorsed as a WhatsApp substitute by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, echoing sentiments from noted whistleblower and online privacy advocate, Edward Snowden.
Image sharing app, Snapchat quietly saw its users surge more than 20% after Facebook’s services collapsed, according to Bloomberg.
Snap Inc. saw a 23% boost in time spent on its Android app compared to the same day the prior week.
The outage of Facebook and its family of apps has opened a new conversation around what it means for a single company to monopolise enormous communication channels like Facebook does with WhatsApp and Instagram. An outage of 6 hours left around 3.2 billion people without their normal chat channels, having them search for alternatives.
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“We’ve spent the past 24 hours debriefing how we can strengthen our systems against this kind of failure,” Zuckerberg wrote in a note to employees on Tuesday.
“The deeper concern with an outage like this isn’t how many people switch to competitive services or how much money we lose, but what it means for the people who rely on our services.”
Kelechi Deca
Kelechi Deca has over two decades of media experience, he has traveled to over 77 countries reporting on multilateral development institutions, international business, trade, travels, culture, and diplomacy. He is also a petrol head with in-depth knowledge of automobiles and the auto industry